On the abortion debates

Although I completed my coursework at Columbia in May 2020 and will not be back on campus for another year, I still feel so attached to this school and community and follow with interest what happens there. This attachment often manifests as being teary-eyed over my morning tea whenever I see a photo of the sunset over campus on Instagram, or, more rarely, in reading a headline, feeling anew the tension I used to feel daily in class, when professors and classmates seemed determined to shut down any dissenting opinion, all the while claiming to embrace free thinking and critical thought. 

Yesterday morning in the New York Times, there was a photo of beautiful Low Library in the sunset, above a headline: "Some Students Want Colleges to Provide the Abortion Pill. Schools are Resisting." The article offered a glimpse into the political tension on campus and I, for once, felt grateful to be living so far away. 

Back when I was a full-time student, I remember walking past a group of pro-life students from the Catholic ministry who had set up a stand in Lerner Hall. Across the table, they had taped the developmental stages of human life, from embryo to fetus to physical death, and were asking passer-by to take a guess at when human life began. I remember thinking to myself, We don't even know what life is, how can anybody say when it begins? Or ends, for that matter? Someone answered "At conception!" They were awarded a chocolate chip cookie. 

As I have grown older, the question about life is increasingly about what and less about when. At times, it seems, the nature of life is strong and robust, even excessive. We are suffering from an excess of life and finally have the technology to emancipate ourselves from its original constraints. In other words, to separate form (including our own) from its original utility, and the meaning this association once brought. And yet there remains the inherent vulnerability of life, and the need for vulnerable people, especially children, pregnant people, the disabled, and the elderly, to be protected from a eugenicist, utilitarian economy that would rather they not exist at all. 

Leo Tolstoy, in a poignant letter to a suicidal reader, expressed the strength and vulnerability of life in this way: "Life is indestructible - it is beyond time and space. Death can only change the form, ending its coming into being in this world." He compared the desire to kill oneself as akin to "wanting to cut off the buds of a plant we want to kill. The plant won't die, but will just grow unevenly." 

Personally, the image I have settled on when thinking about life and its contradictions is a fetus in fetu, or a parasitic twin within a fetus, which, for me, is the perfect representation of, all at once, vulnerability, strength, excess of life, indeterminacy, potentiality, and the suffering engendered by embodiment. Googling "fetus in fetu," one can see a variety of manifestations of this form of life. You won't find them on the signs of protestors. 

Black and white thinking about right action towards life is probably only possible for people for whom physical circumstances perfectly align with their intentions. Definitely not for the fetus in fetu. Nor for many of us: someone whose gender expression differs from their reproductive utility; someone whose intentions not to have children are not shared by their body; someone who would like to have children but whose material situation, due to the aforementioned eugenicist, utilitarian economy perhaps, does not allow for it. 

So while I may or may not share the physical circumstances or intentions of others, while I may or may not agree with them on the absolute urgency to dissociate form from its original utility (because maybe that is not meaningful to me), my experience of suffering from being a body in a world not always supportive of my dreams - of my being a form broken from its origin - is the grounds of the compassion I feel indiscriminately for all others, and for all who have shared our common embodied predicament across time, born or unborn, physically alive or not.

There is no objective answer to the question of life, and this is, I think, what unsettles people most about the issue of abortion: unwanted or dangerous pregnancies remind us that life is both strong and vulnerable. Not just life generally, but our own life and experience.

On snow globes and the two truths

 

"(...) This world is supported by a polarity, that of existence and non-existence. But when one sees the origination of the world as it actually is with right discernment, 'non-existence' with reference to the world does not occur to one. When one sees the cessation of the world as it actually is with right discernment, 'existence' with reference to the world does not occur to one." 

- Buddha, Kaccayanagotta Sutta (link)

On a recent trip to Geneva, I walked by, and barely noticed, a shelf of snow globes featuring the iconic Jet d'Eau, materialized and preserved in water-like substance. The actual Jet d'Eau which I had just visited was reflected in their glass domes, offering a spectacular mise en abyme.

I barely noticed because I have mostly lived in cities and imported kitsch souvenirs fading in the sun have usually lined the streets where I walk. But there was something about the snow globes that bothered me and begged me not to dismiss them without wondering what psychological need was being met by this cultural practice. 

Anthropological investigation requires patience and the courage to call your mind on its politically-correct haughtiness. So thoughts like the irony is that making and importing all this artificial matter in toxic water-like substance is killing the environment, is killing the water, is killing us need to be transitioned to something softer, more open-ended with space for potentiality. To begin, the anthropological mind might ask: what work does a snow globe do? what is it good for?

Very basically, snow globes allow someone to hold on to, and to accumulate, something to which they feel connected - often places, but also characters, scenes, or brands. One fashion blogger wrote that "getting one won't help because you will then want more."

Yet, snow globes are not doing the same work as statues or images, both which they often contain. Many feature a miniature statue, or a background image without anything else. This suggests that it is especially the water mixed with antifreeze, the artificial snow, and the dome which have the ability, through our intentional movement, to transport us back to a certain mood. Some, such as Maison Martin Margiela's empty globe pictured here, contain no statue or image at all, suggesting that mood is actually pre-matter, or spiritual, in nature.

The crystalline, uterine, lemurian worlds, however material and impermanent themselves, invite us to sense ourselves into the essence of something we thought only material.

They invite us to hold this mood, itself imparted through the fragility of matter, through the fragility of the planet, through the fragility of our own perception. There is the question of impending planetary catastrophe, of aging snow globes whose atmosphere has turned yellow and viscous and before which we ask how necessary this all is anyway, and if our urge to have and to hold on to is what got us to this point of no return. 

Artist and snow globe creator Walter Martin, interviewed by Murphy, tried to explain their allure through this lens of control: "It's the relationship with a miniature world with yourself as voyeur and omnipotent being looking down at this scene and you can make it snow."

Beholding them in their fragility is a mise en abyme of our very own predicament: through them, we recognize the futility and impermanence of all things material, the petitesse of our own grasping mind - indeed, how absolutely doomed it is - and yet, in the ultimate truth, in the objective analysis, in the pure awareness, everything is always okay, even when our water yellows and the sky cracks. 

The snow globe may be a completely unnecessary use of finite resources, and yet it is not nothing: the mood it makes accessible is very real and important to us. It is both material - reflecting our belief that it is possible and desirable to hold on to certain moods through things - and spiritual - indulging our need to be closer to and contemplate moods and meanings, conjured by but not reducible to things. It draws us into the tension between relative and ultimate truth and invites us to embrace the potential of the resulting emptiness, which Mingyur Rinpoche, interviewed by Hasenkamp, described:

"When you really look, in the end [a thing] loses its meaning. (...) That is the meaning of what we call empty. So what we call empty and ness, (...) 'empty' meaning, it doesn't inherently exist. And 'ness' meaning, not nothing. Everything can appear. So, possibility. These two are one. Though it does not exist, (...) potential can manifest. (...) What we perceive mostly is in our mind, (...) created by mind. It does not really exist out there, but at the same time, it's not nothing: you're experiencing that. You can still perceive that. So, 'emptiness' meaning, these two are a union, like (...) fire and heat, or water and moisture."

Works Cited

Hasenkamp, W (Host). 2021 April 21. Mingyur Rinpoche - Awareness, Compassion, and Wisdom [audio podcast]. Mind & Life Institute. (link)

Murphy, K. 2012, December 20. The World Through a Flurry of Snow. New York Times. p. E8 (link)

On visual impairment and inclusion

 

As a visually impaired person, most of my life has been spent performing a sighted habitus to pass as fully abled. To have a job, mainly, and just generally to be accepted and heard beyond stereotypes. Things like stopping to look at store window displays or people-watching from a café terrasse are not among the activities I naturally enjoy when I go out. Instead, my attention goes to navigating safely - not walking into anyone on my fully blind side, or being decapitated by a scaffolding or street sign, or mangled by a scooter or a bicycle at an intersection. An outing without any brush with injury always feels like a small victory. As I enter my building after a stroll, I am grateful to my attentive capacity and to higher powers for getting me back home safely once again. 

I think of people who are fully blind, or who are experiencing other disabilities, and about how much more challenging navigating the world alone must be for them. A few weeks ago, for example, I helped a fully blind man untangle himself from a postcard stand, left out on the sidewalk by the papeterie. I couldn't help but contemplate how the wiry mess of shiny, flimsy paper-plastics, devoid of any sensorial quality or texture, imposing itself through a confusing structure only designed for certain people, was the perfect metaphor for the visual primacy implicit in our societies. 

Until recently, as the peripheral vision of my remaining monocular sight has begun to deteriorate, I was unaware of the way visual primacy is also imposed through driving laws. For example, in my city, cyclists can drive against traffic on one-way streets with a speed limit of 30km/hr or less. The consequence of this for someone who primarily sees through central vision and through hearing is the constant requirement to turn fully and check both ways before crossing the street. That sounds fair enough, except that the small streets of old city centers usually need to be criss-crossed dozens of times since the sidewalk is only wide enough for one person (and that is only if it has not been blocked by a bicycle or garbage can). 

Even with the greatest care, on two occasions in the past few months I have been sideswiped by proud cyclists who could not understand why I was walking in the street, even though the street visibly lacked a sidewalk at all. "Faites attention!" they both screeched as they whizzed by, in a hurry to get wherever they were going. It never occurred to either of these people that they themselves could be more careful by simply slowing down. After all, what if they were the visually impaired ones (do not visually impaired people enjoy cycling too)? Their speed meant that my safety depended on their full sight - on their so-called ability - rather than on their wider attentive capacity. 

Which brings me to the question of, not only how to make more accessible roads and cities (which is urgent and important), but also, how to educate to less disabling societies. In a disabling society, the price to pay for inclusion is often nothing less than the betrayal of one's embodied ways of being and knowing, which, to legitimate the epistemicide, must become (and we are educated to this) less than. What would it take for my being in the fragility of being - essentially, in the words of Merleau-Ponty, for my being a body in the body of the world - to coexist safely with others' needs to be above or to be more than - through more speed, more power?

Certainly technology can help, if it recognizes and appreciates my way of being as equal to other faster, more powerful ways. Like many visually impaired people, I have a lot of hope in technology. But being a product of culture, a human technology can only come to be if we begin to take seriously and to educate to the many ways of being and knowing in the embodied, sensory-rich, spacious present.

Precious beyond the beautiful

 

From an anthropological perspective, one aspect of life that COVID has brought to light is the importance of meaning: the question of individual freedom to make meaning following one's own judgment and will.

This struggle between meaning and anti-meaning infuses every area of human activity, from public health and education policy to the ebbs and flows of global financial markets. Anyone with an interest in the latter will have noticed the soaring value of precious metals, namely gold, since the beginning of the pandemic. As the price of gold reached a peak mid-summer and hit an all-time high against the dollar, an event mirrored by the bottoming of national interest rates, many would-be investors began to look to silver, the market for which is eight times smaller than that for gold. 

Personally, I have to admit that I have never been a fan of silver. Too cool and unflattering against my warm skin tone. Is it really authentic to invest in something, I wondered, whether a commodity or a company, that one finds aesthetically displeasing? If the mineral kingdom is the next of the primal slated for total transformation (and indeed, it would seem, a site of future geopolitical struggle), it seemed natural to want to prioritize the beautiful in this process of becoming by betting on its value. Why not invest in beautiful gemstones rather than silver, for example, since gold had grown too expensive?

A practical solution for investing in precious metals involves buying shares in a financial product known as an exchange-traded fund, or ETF. Gold-backed ETFs relieve the investor of having to insure the physical presence of the metal in their possession, as well as the expense of having to ship it and eventually sell it (or fear having it stolen). Instead, one can buy a share in a gold-backed ETF, where physical gold is kept in a vault, often in London, and audited by regulators bi-annually. Of course, there are fears that many ETFs are overleveraged, and should one really need to recover one's investment, fund managers would be unable to satisfy sudden demand for liquidities, essentially replicating the phenomenon of a bank run. 

To my surprise, I discovered no gemstone ETFs. The last one, called GEMS, emerged and failed over the short period of the Great Recession of 2013-2014. Moreover, it was a fund of gemstone mining companies and not physically backed by gemstones. And so I was left mulling a new question: what might we understand from the discourses surrounding the ever-popular gold-backed ETFs that would help us understand why the gemstone ETF failed?

By saying that GEMS failed, I don't mean to imply that it was a bad idea, only that it failed to meet the cultural criteria for a stable hedge investment, which is the whole raison d'être of an ETF. Anthropologically, the idea of a hedge investment has a lot to do with meaning: the perception that there could exist in a given substance a stable meaning, an eternal one even, always accessible beyond our individual and cultural sensibilities. Beyond time. 

Gold is the beloved commodity for most people who can see the precariousness of the national project, its panem et circenses and the subsequent cycles of inflation that ensue. With the massive stimulus spending enacted by national governments as a response to COVID, more money flows into the economy, causing higher inflation as well as higher interest rates, which are good for banks but bad for the value of fiat money. Additionally, investors have faced a lack of foresight concerning supply and demand for oil, given the lockdowns imposed by governments. In light of such instability, hedging options help to ensure the value of one's capital. 

Traditionally, treasuries (bonds) are one such attractive hedge investment during such times, because they don't move in the same direction as equities (stocks). The conventional guidance is to balance one's investments across stocks and bonds, at 60% and 40% respectively. During the pandemic, however, in the context of stimulus spending, the US government has flooded the market with bonds, and the Central Bank has followed by buying bonds at the low end of the yield curve to keep rates low. The result has been that treasuries are no longer seen as a good hedge: while stocks have dropped, treasury yields have not risen. Bond prices are seemingly stuck where they are. 

As real rates, or the difference between what one thinks they are earning on the money invested and the actual value of the money they get back in return from the investment, have gone negative in the US, gold particularly and precious metals generally have become an ever-attractive alternative. 

One factor affecting the potential value of precious metals is their utility qua 'real commodity' subject to supply and demand. For example, about half of silver is used for industrial purposes, such as manufacturing solar panels. Another major factor is the available quantity of the metal, current and projected. All the gold in the world, it is said, could fit into a townhouse. Finally, one oft overlooked factor is the meaning ascribed to the metals by our perception of their purity, a subjective concept that anthropologist Andrew Walsh explores in depth in his ethnography about the global sapphire trade, Made in Madagascar.  

As I have been listening to my gold investor friends, however divided they may be about the legitimacy of gold-backed ETFs, it seems that the metal's purity is what unites them. It occurred to me that this quality might also help to explain why there is no gemstone ETF for the stone lovers among us. 

A major reason given for the winding down of GEMS was that the mining companies, whose operations were financed in part by the investors to the ETF, were themselves linked to the course of equities, being publicly listed companies subject to the whims of the market. Even if that aspect of the fund were corrected (a major structural adjustment, for sure, but not an impossible one), it seems to me that a gemstone-backed ETF would still be a cultural gamble, because of our obsession with purity revealed in how we think about the suitability of gold as a hedge. 

As anyone who has tired of old jewelry pieces well knows, gold can be melted down and molded into a new form. Its value is stable across forms - uniform - because of its purity. Such purity and uniformity of substance are required in order to qualify as an object of exchange, something gold and other precious metals have historically been. By contrast, the purity of gemstones can only be evaluated on an individual basis. The puzzle of which they are a part can never be pieced back together. Consequently, unlike a gold-backed ETF, it would be impossible to know the value of a gemstone-backed ETF through the space held (the weight and quantity) of its stones. 

One fund has tried to address this problem by grouping stones in "baskets" of equivalent purity, independently appraised by a gemologist. The risk, anthropologically speaking, is that "purer" baskets would not actually be objectively purer, only representative of such a level of purity in our perception. Purity here needs to be understood as "purity in perception", not something actually contained in the object, which is the precondition for uniformity.

Gemstones are individuals: in our perception, they do not hold the status of divine substance that gold does. The preference for gold is about its purity in perception across time and across cultures. Psychically, gold acts as a symbol for matter as divine substance. This phenomenon cannot only be understood historically, according to past utility qua object of exchange, but speaks to a psychic striving for the embodiment of an ideal form, a need to identify matter as divine substance that would exist independently of our perception. Because they depend on this cultural fact and appeal to this psychic need, gold-backed ETFs represent a "deeper" materialism than fiat money and productive assets like stocks. 

The paucity of gemstone-backed ETFs shows that a substance must qualify as both uniform and pure to serve as the basis for a stable ETF. Both qualities taken together work to ensure that a substance will give the impression of having value - meaning - outside of human perception and experience. In truth, however, the value of gold, too, depends on our perception and experience of it (and we know this). In this way, it symbolizes our hope for the possibility of a divine substance. Gold represents the divinization of matter, as its worth is believed to be beyond perception, beyond the beautiful. 

 

On color resistance

Aesthetically, as a color resistant, I am enjoying the current mood of natural, pale, dusty, muted, vegetable-dyed almost-color. Painting with it, wearing it, dreaming in it.

Perhaps, I wondered aloud to a longtime friend who stopped to see me in Brooklyn on her way back to Paris just as I was leaving for fieldwork in Beijing, it is an introvert thing: wearing such colors allows one to blend in and go unnoticed. Wasn’t anonymity a big part of why we lived in these harsh cities anyway? Or maybe it was the harmony-seeking, self-effacing, conflict-avoidant, enneagram nine in all of us (and me too)? Or the magical influence of days spent between the pastel lazure walls of the Waldorf kindergarten? I just wish I knew, in the beginning, if it was more a question of life imitating Instagram or vice versa.

John Ruskin wrote in The Stones of Venice that “the purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most,” and I wondered if there was a correlation too with the most thoughtful ethnographers. 

Years of living in Paris and New York, commuting on dirty trains and subways, habituated me to a grayscale palette, though Paris is more of a warm beige and New York more of a cool metallic grey. Either city is heaven, though, for a color resistant. In China, with the exception of the smoky saffron and crimson smocks of the monks passing by in the hutong, it felt like I only ever had the choice between red, black, or white, all very elegant colors to be sure (and at some point I did buy a big black tulle skirt) but too high in contrast to support getting lost somewhere between polarities and being barely there, which was my aim.

Color, it occurred to me, is what happens while we wait. Like all aspects of fashion, color reflects our intentions for change and reveals how we see ourselves in relation to time. Between the finalities of black and white, there is Bergsonian lived time, la durée, the time of our perception and experience. 

As I folded a summer’s worth of vegetable-dyed linen frocks into my suitcase, I pondered how much the ethnographer’s uniform must have changed since Malinowski, who was usually clad in white. In Professor Taussig’s class, we spent a session discussing the chapter “Administration by Bluff” in What Color is the Sacred? where Taussig shares his theory of color and ‘color’. “Goethe,” Taussig reminds us, “says that color in its utmost brightness is shunned by people of refinement, who prefer black and white. Yet even for such people, is there not a quality of whiteness that is so stunning that it amounts to the brightest of bright colors – as manifest by those men in the colonies (…) who adopted a whiteness that covered every square inch of skin, such as workers wear in infectious-disease units or when approaching a toxic dump?” (80) To support his argument about the relationship between color and ‘color’, Taussig shares a photo (“Ethnographer with a Man in a Wig”) of Malinowski and a native sorcerer who is mostly naked save for his wig, and provocatively asks, “is not the man in white every bit as magical as the sorcerer? (…) Nobody looking at the image, with the possible exception of the natives, would know the sorcerer was wearing a wig. In reality, it is the ethnographer who is “bewigged,” decked out in his colonial outfit, which, in its colorless purity, like a painter’s untouched canvas, suggests that color shall open the doors to the art of ethnography (…)” (83).

Could it be, I wondered, that the current palette of pure, unsubsumed primal colors - dandelion, citron, peat, terracotta, oat – was the new colonial white? These colors, as I learned firsthand during an organic dye workshop, are produced using vegetable dyes which are usually carefully grown, sometimes hard to find and expensive, and always ephemeral, in contrast to the colorfast, flashy, mainly synthetic colors readily available for a few dollars to the poorest people in street markets. Yet, because bright colors cannot be worn more than a season without needing to be replaced by more bright colors, they represent the constraint of capitalism and one's dependency on it. Natural colors may fade, but this only adds to their authentic character. “They look good on all skin tones,” touted the teacher of the dye workshop, “because, unlike synthetics, they contain the entire spectrum of light.”

The trend of color resistance, then, would seem to be an expression of aesthetic privilege: of the luxury of escaping the constraints of capitalism, not only as a consumer in one's own wardrobe choices, but also in one's situation as owner, exempt from the requirement of wearing saturated, on-task hues in order to display one's worth and productive capacity. 

Because it is necessary to be well placed socio-economically to be able to afford to dress in rare primal colors, these colors have the effect of obfuscating the historicity of the process of commodification of natural resources. If we view fashion trends as aesthetic attempts to make appealing the enrollment of one's body in a given moment of transformation in accordance with market necessity, we can understand the current trend of color resistance as a way of ostensibly rejecting such transformation of oneself by appearing to stand outside of the process of change - like a native. The silence of neutrals exposes the artifice of the transformed. But the only way such a social distancing is possible in a modern society is if one's position in the economic hierarchy is solidified  - accumulated - enough to make it so.

If money is no object, one can find anything. And fashion is related to this economic fact: the more one has, the more one can afford to have, the more it becomes necessary to create an impression of scarcity in the aesthetic realm that justifies and drives real scarcity in the material realm. The disconnect from nature engendered by this process requires increasingly efficient technology that is also enlisted to spew out synthetic fabrics and colors. Through fashion, the process of transformation comes on and into the body and seduces us by its unpredictability and its freedom from the constraints of origin. It offers hope for a body eventually freed from them too. But along the way of commodifying natural resources, scarcity is displaced from the realm of the transformed back to the primal, such that in fine primal fabrics and colors are most à la mode. 

Indulging in them hardly makes one beyond capitalism, however, because in a modern society one must stand in a place of privilege vis-à-vis technological processes in order to afford this new earthy trend. One must, directly or indirectly, control access to those natural resources from which such fabrics and colors are derived. This trend is a change of course with fashion traditionally because it obfuscates, rather than celebrates, enmeshment with and dependency on capitalism and its technologies, suggesting that the transformation of the body is something best left for others. It signifies a new aesthetic hierarchy that places the time of salvation back at the beginning, suggesting a denouement of the whole transformative operation. 

Color resistance may well be just another operation in colonial concealment, the latest bourgeois aesthetic trompe l'oeil, because it involves not a recovery of living in mimesis with nature (that would require a lifestyle change, and a systemic change for that matter) but a claim to nature from without, from the urban comfort of mastery. A claim to what purity remains in the world by an aesthetic distancing of the colonizer from the exploitative processes upon which his privileged access to nature depends, and an aesthetic distancing from the colonized who no longer have the luxury of living mimetically with primal, untransformed Nature. By appropriating the primal color palette, the privileged take on the appearance of being embedded in the fundamental forces of matter and beyond the social. 

My friend suggested that there was something to be said, nevertheless, for the healing potential of such colors, for their warmth and peace and vulnerability. For the mimetic intention they express. Which is why it is good not to restrict oneself, to overcome the habit of color resistance.

Further Reading

St. Clair, Kassia. The Secret Lives of Color. Penguin Books: New York, 2016. 

Taussig, Michael. What Color is the Sacred? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.